Fever Player on Temporary Leave Gets Message From Indiana GM
The suspension of Damiris Dantas' Indiana Fever contract is being lifted now that she's set to rejoin the team.
Advertisement
The 6-foot-4 center was away from the WNBA team for roughly two weeks, representing Brazil at the 2025 FIBA Women's AmeriCup in Santiago, Chile. The tournament ended on Sunday with Brazil taking part in the final, but unfortunately for Dantas and Co., they came up short in the gold medal game against a powerhouse United States side.
Despite a valiant effort from a previously undefeated Brazil squad, the Americans were still able to come through and secure a 92-84 victory behind a 27-point eruption by tournament MVP Mikayla Blakes.
Dantas did all she could for Brazil, dropping a game-high 35 points on 11-of-19 shooting, eight rebounds, four assists, two steals and one triple in 40 minutes of play. It still wasn't enough, though, and Brazil had to settle for a second-place finish.
Damiris Dantas of the Indiana Fever shoots the ball during a game. Christine Tannous/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Dantas' strong performance in the final made all sorts of waves on social media. This included a congratulatory message from Fever CEO and general manager Amber Cox, who issued a brief statement on Dantas' strong outing against Team USA.
Advertisement
"Congrats to DD on a great run with Brazil!" Cox wrote on X.
Cox and the rest of the Fever organization are now looking forward to Dantas' return. She should be heading back to Indianapolis now and could be available to play when the Fever return to action on Wednesday against the Golden State Valkyries.
Dantas, who was named part of the AmeriCup's All Star 5 first team, will now be looking to carry the momentum of her excellent tournament with her national side to her performances with Indiana.
Related: Indiana Fever on Temporary Leave Suffers Painful Blow on Sunday
Related: Lexie Hull Reacts to Indiana Fever News on Sunday
Related: Caitlin Clark, Fever Teammates React to Sophie Cunningham's Exciting Post
This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jul 8, 2025, where it first appeared.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBS News
28 minutes ago
- CBS News
Ice hockey fans, players excited for World Juniors tournament coming to Minnesota
Minnesota hockey fans get an extra gift this holiday season. The World Juniors is coming to the state of hockey. "Like no other," described defenseman Logan Hensler. "Happens once a year. It's always on TV. People are always watching, talking about it. There's a ton of attention to it. It's a pretty cool experience." Hensler has been there before. The defenseman from Woodbury took gold last January. Now, he's trying to repeat as a large, talented group tangle for a roster spot on Team USA. "Your compete, your discipline. All around play. You get pushed every day by these guys," said Hensler. "It's just important you keep up and keep going. Push through." Hensler's last few months have been his most accomplished in hockey. He won the most recent World Juniors gold and was then selected 23rd overall by the Ottawa Senators in the NHL draft in June. "Dream come true," remembered Hensler. "Got there, it was a great experience. The moment I got picked was kind of a blur. Kind of a blackout moment. Really special. Great organization. Just happy my family was there to witness it." Hensler, the top Minnesotan selected in 2025, will be a sophomore with the Badgers this winter. But it might not be long before he trades red and white for Ottawa's colors. "This next coming year I'm going back to Wisconsin," said Hensler. "A big thing for me is taking it year by year. Just gonna take this year, see how it goes. See how I grow as a player. I think it'll be a lot of growing. So it'll be fun." Note: The above video first aired on Jan. 5, 2025.
Yahoo
44 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Sex toy thrown onto WNBA court for second time in 3 days, briefly stopping game
Three days after a WNBA game was stopped after a fan tossed a sex toy onto the court, it happened again. The bright green object was thrown onto the court at Wintrust Arena during a contest between the Golden State Valkyries and the Chicago Sky on Friday, forcing referees to stop play. The stoppage happened midway through the third quarter after Valkyries guard Kate Martin launched and missed a deep 3-pointer. Officials stopped play immediately after the toy flew onto the court along the baseline underneath the Sky's basket. Referee Blanca Burns quickly kicked it off the floor before a Sky equipment staffer removed it. Sky forward Elizabeth Williams expressed her frustration with the incident. 'I think it's super disrespectful. I don't get it, I don't really get the point of it,' Williams said during a postgame news conference after Chicago fell to Golden State 73-66. 'It's really immature. Whoever is doing it just needs to grow up.' A similar occurrence took place on Tuesday night while a neon green sex toy was tossed onto the floor in a game between the Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream at the Chase Center in San Francisco. That incident happened during the fourth quarter, with less than a minute left on the clock, and television cameras caught the toy before a laughing security guard removed it with a towel. This article originally appeared in The Athletic. Chicago Sky, Golden State Valkyries, WNBA 2025 The Athletic Media Company
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Business of Football: John Textor's new grand plan, and Premier League made to fork out for lawyers
You would be forgiven for thinking that news of John Textor quitting all positions of authority at Lyon, selling his stake in Crystal Palace to Woody Johnson, and putting his Florida mansion on the market might suggest that this self-styled cowboy was riding off into the sunset. For the Multi-Club Kid, however, these apparent setbacks are mere flesh wounds. He is getting a new posse together to buy Botafogo and RWDM Brussels, his Brazilian and Belgian clubs, from his partners at Eagle Football Group. He is also trying to rope in a new English club, mix in his facial-recognition turnstile technology, and then drive the whole herd to market in New York to make a killing. Advertisement As well as all this, on July 4, Textor filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida against Iconic Sports, the group of investors that gave him $75million (£56.5m) to help him buy Lyon in 2022 in exchange for a minority stake in Eagle. Textor's complaint is against Iconic and its two principals, American investors James Dinan and Alexander Knaster, and it is for alleged securities fraud and fraudulent misrepresentation in connection with a put option — the right to sell something at a fixed price by a certain date — they agreed with Textor in 2022. This Florida action came after Iconic hit Textor with a similar claim in London the day before; a claim it had been unable to publish as it sent it to the Jupiter Island property Textor bought from Microsoft founder Bill Gates for $4m in 2018 and is now selling for $23.5m (because he has built an even bigger one nearby). Under English law, you cannot publish unserved lawsuits. Iconic says it informed Textor of its desire to get out via the put option in July 2023, reminded him and Eagle's board about it in December 2023, and then again in March and July of 2024, by which time Textor was meant to have completed the buy-back. He did not, which is why Iconic believes it is owed nearly $94m and has written to Eagle's board with share-transfer documents for Textor's 65 per cent holding in the whole shebang. Textor, on the other hand, says Dinan and Knaster breached first. He says they knew they would never be able to meet the conditions because they had been unable to get any banks to underwrite the transaction. Textor's initial counter-suit was thrown out by the Florida court on July 10 because of some shoddy work by his legal team, but he was allowed to refile it a day later. And following Iconic's letter to the Eagle board on July 15, Textor hit back with a request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Iconic on July 22. Advertisement On July 28, the court rejected Textor's request for the simple reason that the original Textor/Iconic agreements make it clear that any disputes between them should be hammered out in the English courts, as Eagle is an English company. In the meantime, Lyon have finally filed some partial accounts for last season, which show they are going to make another huge loss despite selling all of their best players. This, understandably, has greatly upset the rest of Eagle's initial investors, including Ares Management Corporation, the huge American investment firm that loaned Eagle $425m to complete the Lyon purchase. Ares has already snaffled nearly all of the proceeds from Textor's sale of his Palace stake, but is still owed about $300m. Given the collapse of French football's latest domestic TV deal, Textor's sale of Lyon's indoor arena and women's football teams, and Rayan Cherki et al, can Lyon cover that amount? The answer is probably 'non'. Textor, however, is nothing if not resilient. He also genuinely likes football, and in Botafogo, the 2024 Brazilian and South American champions, can point to a success story. His response to all of the above is to buy Botafogo and RWDM Brussels from Eagle. He would then move these clubs into a new Cayman Islands-registered Eagle entity, throw in his Facebank technology company that has moved into facial recognition ticketing systems, and push for his long-promised New York IPO. Oh, and he will try to add a new English club (teams like QPR, Southampton, or Watford, as opposed to Sheffield Wednesday) to the mix to make something that should fly off the New York Stock Exchange's proverbial shelves. Football plus tech, a unicorn combo. And, just to complete the vision, he may hold onto his two-thirds share in the old Eagle — Lyon, in other words — or be open to suggestions from Ares and Co as to how much those shares are worth (about the same as Botafogo, perhaps?). Advertisement Or, as has been reported in Brazil this week, he might just merge his new Eagle with Greek billionaire Evangelos Marinakis' multi-club group (Olympiacos, Nottingham Forest, and Portugal's Rio Ave), although he might not have run this past the Greek billionaire properly, as it has come as news to Forest. No spoilers, I promise, but the Brad Pitt character in the film F1 (great fun, by the way, much better than the actual sport) has a line that becomes part of the plot, 'sometimes when you lose, you win'. For the Premier League, it seems the opposite can be true, as it found itself almost £1m out of pocket on fees related to its successful prosecution of a profit and sustainability case against Nottingham Forest in March 2024. Ordinarily in these circumstances, the losing party would pay for the winner's legal costs, or at least a big portion of them, and the cost of the PSR hearing. And that is certainly what the Premier League had in mind when it sent Forest a bill in excess of £1.4m. The majority of this was a fixed fee the league negotiated with Linklaters, the global law firm it has used for all of its recent PSR cases. For the Forest case, the league agreed to pay the firm £1.1m, but that was reduced to £985,000 because Linklaters did not need to put in quite as many hours as initially estimated. And there was also a bill of just over £140,000 for a report from an expert. The club, however, said words to the effect of 'that's a bit steep, isn't it?', as their bill from their well-known legal firm, Squire Patton Boggs, was about half as much, and their expert report cost a third of the Premier League's. After all, Forest noted, we confessed to the PSR breach pretty fast, so did the Premier League need to 'lawyer up' for this one at all? Long story short, Forest lawyered up for the costs row, calling in Nick 'The Wolf' De Marco for a costs hearing in May. Advertisement And despite failing on his attempt to argue that Forest did not really lose the PSR hearing, he successfully argued that the Premier League's legal bill was too high and it did not need the expert report at all. So, when the three-person panel's result was published last month, it revealed that the league had been awarded only £530,000 of its claim, 37 per cent, and had been ticked off for overspending on lawyers and experts. This would be only mildly embarrassing if it were a one-off, but it was not. The league also only got about a third of its £4.9m legal bill for successfully prosecuting Everton's two PSR breaches in 2023 and 2024. For those keeping count, that is more than £4m in unrewarded legal costs for cases the Premier League actually won. The mind boggles as to how much a defeat would cost them. No pressure, then. There should be no giggling about the Premier League's legal bills over at the English Football Association, as it has recently been dumped on its backside by De Marco, too. I am not talking about his win in the high-profile Lucas Paqueta case. No, this was an appeal by the FA to an earlier decision by a disciplinary panel into a case involving Accrington Stanley's inadvertent use of an unlicensed agent in a transfer deal in 2024. The unnamed agent was representing the player but had recently failed his agent's exam, so had lost his licence. When the FA got wind of this, it charged the League Two club and Accrington initially admitted the charge, asking only for a personal hearing to discuss mitigation. But while they waited for this hearing, they reconsidered. After all, the rules state that nobody should 'engage or appoint' an unlicensed agent and they did not hire the agent. The player might have a case to answer, they thought, but we did not 'engage' the agent, he did. So, they changed their plea and won. Advertisement The FA then appealed against this ruling, saying 'engage' really means 'engage with', as in have any dealings with someone. That is why there is an 'or' between 'engage' and 'appoint' — they mean two different things. But, as we learned in the Leicester City case, words matter, especially prepositions. The appeal panel, and it is all explained in their written reasons, decided that 'engage' is not the same as 'engage with', handing Accrington a reprieve and De Marco another head for his trophy cabinet.
